Mid-Nineteenth Century

Adrian Louis's "A Colossal American Copulation" borrows heavily from Walt Whitman, whose poetics have been central to much of the American poetry that would follow. Louis, though, appropriates (as Ginsberg's poetry does) the free verse and cultural catalogues that Whitman used to celebrate and cohere a mid-nineteenth century America for its own later project of denouncing that same America. And while Louis' catalogue of what deserves to be fucked ranges freely over late twentieth century America, there is nevertheless a persistent logic to its categories. It targets violence made even more repugnant for its banality ("Fuck the men who keep their dogs chained./ Fuck the men who molest their daughters.") It especially criticizes acts of state violence. "Fuck the gutless Guardsmen / who were at Kent State...." and "Fuck, no, double fuck the Vietnam War." Beyond its critique of personal and state violence, though, the poem also aims at popular culture ("Fuck...The Immaturity of MTV. Those Monster Trucks.") and what we might simply call bad taste (Fuck...my other neighbor who has plastic life-sized deer in his front yard.") The poem is also free with its condemnations of its contemporary literary scene: "Fuck the Creative
Writing programs/ and all the SPAM poets they hatch." "Fuck The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. And all those useless allusions." And (my favorite): "F*U*C*K the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poets." Perhaps it's too generous to explain away those critiques we might have more trouble cheering on--its possible backhanded racism ("Fuck every gangbanger in America") and misogyny ("Fuck...That first pussy I ever touched") by arguing that even the speaker has been corrupted by that which he so doggedly critiques. Nevertheless, all these individual critiques add up to a wholesale condemnation of America and American culture. "A Colossal American Copulation" goes beyond something like reformism to reject the whole American cultural scene and even, I would argue, though they are only obliquely evoked, the foundations of that scene.

The poem begins and ends with a stanza expressing the speaker's resignation:

"They say there's a promise
coming down that dusty road.
They say there's a promise coming down
That dusty road, but I don't see it."

"Promise," in its abstractness, carries multiple meanings. The legal coercion of Indian Removal in the 1830s and 1840s, the promise of "assimilation," which is a nice word, to call forth House Resolution 108 from 1953, for "termination," and finally the promise of cultural autonomy and a decent way of life that goes unfulfilled even today. But that this promise is to arrive "down that dusty road" suggests finally a critique of the promises of Western Civilization and the promises of equality and equal protection under the law contained in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the American incarnation of the West. In an interview with Geronimo, a journal of politics and culture, Louis says of the United States

Oh, it's here. I try to ignore it if I can. (Pause) This country was founded on violence. So it's kind of like karma coming back to haunt us, you know. When the Spaniards came into the towns here they killed more Indians than Hitler killed Jews in his ovens. It's a greater holocaust here than there was in Europe during World War II. That's a historical fact. America is a schizophrenic country. On the one hand, it purports to be the peace loving center of the universe. On the other hand, it's got everything it has from violence and taking.

It's an open question whether the violence and barbarity at the source of America undermines any claims it can make for its contribution to democracy and freedom, its promises. For some, the abuses trump whatever good may have or will come. Except in "A Colossal American Copulation," there is no suggestion of those goods, those promises, which are infinitely promised but also infinitely postponed, until the speaker has given up on ever seeing them. Instead, we get the detritus of
popular culture and a smug violence, metonymies for the larger culture, all of which the speaker equally, and with pointed language, rejects.

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